The Intertwined Cycle of SEO and SEARCH: A Quick Guide

If you are selling something online and have good visibility to your conversion metrics, PPC may be the best competitive strategy you have. But using PPC to guide your on-page SEO will help your Google Page Rank which in turn will improve the economics of your PPC campaigns.

Google uses page rank (authority) to price your clicks and give you better link placement. Know, love, and improve your page rank and you will have better SEO performance as well. The google logic is the same for PPC and Search Engine Ranking. Here are some tips that can help with your PPC and SEO programs.

SOCIAL MEDIA LAW #1: Nobody forwards boring content, unless they are paid to.

PPC/Adwords

Use Adwords dollars to understand your market and what terms have power

Adwords can inform your SEO work in a matter of days, rather than weeks

Keep using Adwords dollars to build new areas of SEO strength, unless you are an e-commerce site continuing to pay for clicks is a losing strategy.

SEO

Content is king, but if you dilute the content to become search bait, keywords don't read all that well.

Create good content that people will forward.

A forward/share/stumble/pin/tweet/facebook post all serve to build up your back links or "link love" in the eyes of Google search

Do your homework about SEO structures. (Did you know META data is almost worthless? Google ignores 90% of META descriptions anyway. They do use META: "title" and META: summary. But your keywords in META only make it easier for your competition to scoop your SEO work.

Read your competitors code. If they use META KEYWORDS the are showing you their word matrix. Compare notes. Find the best 20 terms.

Produce a lot of good content. (Try and post weekly. Daily is best, but be realistic.)

Aggregate the heck out of your content, make sure you are sharing it with as wide an audience as possible. (Note: If you publish crap content (or SEO bait) your forwards, retweets and favorites will be low.)

Give away the secrets. If you provide insights and value to your readers they will read your content. They will forward and link to the good stuff.

Make your site and content juicy for spiders. (WordPress does very well on Google because of its clean code, if you are using something else, make sure you have good content vs code separation)

Keep it clean and simple. Too many keywords, content that is written solely for the purpose of generating traffic is very unlikely to go viral.

Go viral. If what you have written is good, controversial over the top, informative, really good, or funny, you have a chance of getting noticed. If it's boring, or marketing-speak, you don't. Simple as that.

If you're so smart, share your toolkit with the rest of us. We are all in this together. Everyone is trying to do it better, faster, cheaper. But we have to focus on the BETTER first and foremost. If you define a better way to do something share it. If you have a GTD secret that is kickin ass, share it. If you know something we don't share it.

Good content wants to be free. And by setting it free you enable the traffic and links to build without your efforts.

Don't get too hung up on the publishing rules. (time of day, frequency, what to publish) Publish what you know about, and publish it as soon as it is complete. Sure, you can socialize it during the peak social media hours, but get the content out there and indexed in Google as soon as possible.

Good content is a magnet for Google and thus a magnet for potential customers. And that's the business side of social media: grow your business.

Request: If I've missed some obvious points, please add them to the comments and I will add them.

I tend to agree with you that using PPC as our principal strategy is costly. But if we are selling something online and have a good visibility to our conversion metrics, then I guess, PPC will be the best aggressive strategy we may have.